For example, electronic control devices for plant equipment or equipment of plants and the like (hereinafter referred to as “electronic control devices and the like”) are affected by the installation environment during the use thereof and troubles and abnormalities may sometimes occur. Therefore, it becomes necessary to carry out an investigation of the installation environment of electronic control devices and the like. In general, this investigation of the installation environment has hitherto been performed at some specific point of time, for example, before the delivery of equipment including electronic control devices, during the installation of equipment, at periodical inspection of equipment, and in the case where some inconvenience occurred unexpectedly in electronic control devices and the like. The measuring period of various kinds of data in this investigation is a short period of at most several weeks or so. That is, the measurement of data is sporadic, and the monitoring and diagnosis of abnormalities are not continuously performed for a long period of time.
Furthermore, in conventional measurements of data, first, workers including contractors who contracted to take the measurements set measuring equipment, such as a thermometer, a hygrometer, an accelerometer, a gas concentration meter, a voltmeter, an ammeter, and an electromagnetic wave meter, at the site. Next, after the measurements for a fixed period the workers revisit the site to retrieve the measurement data. In general, a series of steps of analyzing the retrieved measurement data, compiling a report, and submitting the report to a client, are carried out. Therefore, the investigation of the installation environment has the problem that the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data require much labor and expense.
Incidentally, in conventional data measurement, in the above-described series of steps, the measurement and collection of data are sometimes automatically performed. However, the preparation of a report based on an analysis of data and results of the analysis are not automatically performed. For this reason, it is necessary for the workers to retrieve the collected data, to perform the analysis and the preparation of a report, and these works require much labor and expense in the same manner as described above.
Therefore, there are known conventional systems in which to solve such problems, for example, a diagnosis of life and degree of deterioration by the corrosion of metallic areas of equipment of a plant and the like, is performed using environmental information (refer to Patent Literature 1, for example). In the system described in Patent Literature 1, among the above-described various kinds of measurement data in the investigation of the installation environment, only what is called environmental data, such as temperature, humidity, and concentrations of corrosive gasses, is measured. And the measured environmental data is inputted to a diagnostic client. The diagnostic client sends the environmental data to a diagnostic server. The sending of the environmental data is performed via the Internet. The diagnostic server estimates the life and degree of deterioration of equipment based on the environmental data while referring to the information accumulated in a diagnostic database, and presents results of the estimation and a remedy to the diagnostic client.
Furthermore, there are also known systems in which the object of monitoring is an electronic control panel for plant equipment and the soundness of the environment in the control panel is monitored (refer to Patent Literature 2, for example). In the system described in Patent Literature 2, environmental sensors which measure the installation environment of various kinds of equipment in the control panel and physical sensors which measure physical quantities of various kinds of equipment in the control panel are provided in the control panel. And measurement data by these sensors are sent to a monitoring device (a computer system) by wireless communication outside of the control panel. This monitoring device is provided with an algorithm which monitors the soundness of the environment of the control panel from the correlation between changes in measurement data and a knowledge database related to an environmental standard stored beforehand. And when abnormality occurred, the place of occurrence and cause of the abnormality are estimated and the contents of countermeasures and support are outputted to a screen of the monitoring device.